Recalling past change shatters the complacency that inevitability reinforces

Evidence

Because large-scale social change has actually happened, again and again. From the most majestic and improbable (the Civil Rights Movement in the United States miraculously effected the “transformation of the consciousness of millions of Americans”) to the most ghastly and calamitous (Haiti has largely ceased to function as a working polity within the last decade). Telling stories about change in the past helps us see that change is always ahead, and helps shatter the inertial complacency that consistently makes now feel like it has a hold on forever. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 192

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core strategy: activists must ‘undermine the old sense of inevitability’ by storytelling about past change.
• SEED: An essay testing the power of this strategy by finding a counter-example: a past change whose memory did NOT inspire hope.
• XREF: connects to: Marcuse argued memory of past happiness guarantees the demand for total happiness — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2143